CTM 2016 festival presented a special edition of the "Seismographic Sounds. Visions of a New World" exhibition, curated by Norient — the International Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media Culture with contributions from CTM. For the exhibition’s presentation within CTM 2016, Norient and CTM curated additional works by Pedro Reyes, Tianzhuo Chen, and Svetlana Maraš.

“Seismographic Sounds. Visions of a New World” is a multi-authored exhibition assembling distinct music, sound art and videos created, compiled and commented by 250 artists, musicians, academics and bloggers from 50 countries. Often produced in small studios from Jakarta to La Paz, Cape Town to Helsinki, these works experiment with the possibilities of the internet age and illuminate new spaces beyond the confines of commercialism, propaganda, and bigotry. Countering pessimistic views that globalisation and digitisation have led to cultural uniformity, they foresee a changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of North versus South, West versus East.

By diving into six topics — Money, Loneliness, War, Belonging, Exotica and Desire — visitors explore the exhibition as an audio-visual composition filled with music videos with subversive sounds and messages; experimental podcasts from local artists and journalists; a three-channel round table installation hosting controversial discussions between journalists, bloggers, artists and academics; and numerous other sound and video installations, experimental audio mixtapes and remixes. While a seismograph measures and records force and duration of earthquakes, with “Seismographic Sounds”, Norient aims to measure visions of a new world. In keeping with this mandate, all exhibition content comes from multiple perspectives of musicians, authors, journalists and photographers from all over the world.

Complementing the exhibition, the CTM 2016 Discourse programme of talks, panels, music diffusions, film screenings and more was curated in close collaboration with Norient. The Discourse programme presented a range of “Seismographic Sounds” contributors. Sarah Abunama-Elgadi, Meira Asher, FOKN Bois, Wendy Hsu, Adam Harper, Chris Saunders, and many more discuss ethical borders when working with local sounds, postcolonialism and new strategies of researching music today.